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Climate Change How can communities sustain the health of Lake Superior in the face of climate change, mining, invasive species, and emerging chemicals of concern?

The challenges facing Lake Superior are many--yet local, regional, and international communities overcame enormous threats to the lake's ecosystems in the past century. My research asks: what can we learn from the extraordinary conservation recoveries of Lake Superior over the past century, as we face new interconnected challenges?

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Fish, Forests, & Toxics Lake Superior seems pure, cold, lovely, wild, and vast: a wilderness. Yet it’s under threat. Water levels have been dropping, water temperatures have been rising, and development has been fragmenting forests, draining wetlands, and cutting estuaries off from the lake.

Exotic species, particularly zebra mussels and sea lamprey, continue to wreak massive changes in food webs and entire ecosystems, and asian carp seem poised to invade the lake. Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) remain, even though many of them were banned decades ago, while new synthetic endocrine-disrupting chemicals make their way into the lake.

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Mining The Lake Superior watershed is undergoing a new mining rush as demand and prices for metals increase. While new mines may mean new jobs, they can also undermine the health of human and environmental communities.

What can we learn from the history of past mines in the watershed as we try to decide whether new mines are justified? For example, do the old taconite mines on Minnesota's north shore that are currently leaching sulfate into the St. Louis River estuary and releasing mercury into the atmosphere offer us any insights into the Penokee mine in the Bad River Watershed that Gogenic Taconite is proposing?

Sustaining Lake Superior
How can communities help sustain the health of Lake Superior in the face of mining, climate change, forest change, invasive species, and emerging chemicals of concern?  The challenges facing Lake Superior are many--yet local, regional, and international communities overcame enormous threats to the lake's ecosystems  in the past century.  

My current research asks: What can we learn from the  recoveries around Lake Superior over the past century, as we face new interconnected challenges from climate change, synthetic chemicals, and forest change?

Lake Superior has witnessed several significant conservation success stories in the past half century:
  • the recovery of forests after the devastation of the cutover era
  • the recovery of fisheries after the collapse of fish populations from overfishing, industrialization, habitat loss, and invasive species in the second half of the 20th century,
  • the substantial cleaning up of many toxic waste sites 

None of these recoveries are complete: the recovered forests are very different than the forests that were logged so quickly, toxics still present huge challenges, a new mining boom is underway just as regulations are being relaxed, and fisheries are certainly not fully recovered. 

Yet they are still significant, and they offer us hope as we face new environmental challenges, trying to shape resilient strategies in the face of an uncertain future.



 
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The main topics (Climate Change, Watersheds, and Mining) pages of this website will include various essays  that I write as I research this project. Please feel free to email me with comments, news and updates.